Learn to code, everybody said. There’s so many jobs, and they pay well. Dumbass me fell for the bait. Graduated with a degree in computer science a year and a week ago. Didn’t get any internships because I didn’t realize how important they are. Graduated with a 2.3 GPA because I always heard people don’t care about your GPA once you graduate. If you’re generous and cut out the hours from when I failed out of college the first time, it’s a 2.6.
I’ve applied to over a thousand jobs by now. Almost entirely entry level, but I took shots at some nonspecified experience level postings once I got more desperate. I’ve managed to get two interviews. To add insult to injury, one of the interviewers said that their main concern with me was that I’d move on to a new job in a year or two. I couldn’t do that if I wanted to, man. I’m so burnt out on how bad applying for shit sucks when I know most of these companies are throwing my application in the trash in less than 5 seconds.
I’ve been able to stay stable so far. I live with my parents, who are the best parents I could ever ask for. They’re understanding, supportive, and want to help how they can. No worries on the living expenses front, at least, but it’s not a situation that can last. In the long term, obviously, they’re not gonna be around forever. In the short term, it’s just going to drive me completely insane. I’ve used my leftover student loans and a generous graduation gift from my uncle for the non-essential stuff and managed to limit my spending to about $100 a month, but the well will dry up on that front, too.
All this is to say that I don’t think I can get a job with my degree. A year long gap is a bad sign on an already weak resume. Soon it’ll be as good as if I had never gone to school in the first place after I spent years forcing myself through math classes I tore my hair out over (why was this 75% of my degree again?) I’ve tried doing some independent game development to maybe transition in that direction, but I can’t force myself to do it because the whole time I just feel like I’m wasting time I should be spending looking for a “real” job. My parents have frequently encouraged me to go get a master’s while I wait for the job market to improve. After telling them for months that I didn’t want to sink any more money in education (read: training) until it showed some returns, I caved and started looking into grad programs. Looks like I couldn’t do it if I wanted to because lmao 2.3 GPA. I’m confident I could get a great score on the GRE, I’ve always done pretty fantastic on that kind of test. It’s the one academic skill I have that I can brag about, honestly. But the GRE for Math would kick my ass into next week, and I’m pretty certain most MS in CS programs would want me to take it.
So I can’t get a job in my major, I’m too neurotic to do anything on my own, my grades are too shit to get a graduate degree. I’m 28 now and not getting any younger. I’m beyond sick of being dependent on others. But what else can I do? Service jobs suck tremendously and don’t pay enough for me to live off of anyways, especially around where I live. It’d be equivalent of choosing to live in poverty. Every road seems closed off to me. I don’t know what I can do to make my way through life and I feel like even if I did, I’d be too much of a coddled loser to take that path.
Sorry for turning it into a blog, I’m basically just some random failson whining. Anybody relate?
Edit: Thanks for the replies, everybody. Feeling a little bit less down. Probably gonna try and make some contributions to a FOSS project and get a job at a grocery store or something while I still live at home.
Never found nothing, been working retail for 15 years since I graduated. I’ve tried going back to school to try out teaching, but my head isn’t in that place anymore. And I got a job teaching students English, but the pay was worse than retail once you factored in needing to spend hours on prep and assessment and left me an exhausted wreck, who was also still working 12 hours of retail.
Is your resume eye catching? I know this sounds like LinkedIn advice, but you gotta play the game.
Something like this:
vs
I can’t see either image, for some reason, but I’ve done quite a few revisions to my resume with some help from assorted sources. I got some help from my uni’s career center, paid for a resume review from Indeed, asked my Mom who used to work in HR, and visited the CS career subreddit. I finally settled on a single column, minimal “special” formatting with some nice dividing lines. The contact info’s in a nice header with the name bolded and in a decent font size. It’s a single page, starting with education followed by whatever project experience I could shoehorn in as relevant.
Geez, you’ve been going at it. Is your GPA on your resume? I would leave it off if you can.
I left it off until I got desperate enough to start lying about it.
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Unless the country norms is to include a headshot, always leave it off because it exposes the company to discrimination lawsuits
For tech, the 2nd resume wins 9/10 times. 2 columns suck cause it doesn’t have a good flow for eye movement. And unless the job requires design skills the aesthetics is distracting. -> What I’ve learned from lots of recruiters and hiring managers
My resume looks like the second (with better whitespace) but I highlight the headings with a nice blue for the eyecatching factor while still maintaining info density and organization
What if you lie and pretend you don’t have an education at all in order to get some job somewhere to end the work gap on your resume and/or get into an internship while you’re living with your parents and more able to deal with the burden of unpaid labor
This is assuming your education is what’s making employers be like “oh you’ll just leave us soon 😔”
The education’s not it. It was just the one guy. It was the company’s CEO who decided to join in on the interview. Part of the application process was taking a cognitive test and a personality test. He told me I was pretty weird on both fronts and started ranting about ambition and how he’d love to hire me but he thinks that I “could end up being the next Steve Jobs and would get bored of the job too fast.” I mostly just chalked it up to small business owner brainrot, but I at least got to feel good about what was probably a complement.
I’m closing in on a year unemployed after getting laid off. It’s hard out here, and don’t let anyone tell you different just because the stock market is up.
I know you’re hesitant on extra education, but it doesn’t have to be a masters or grad program. There’s often certificates out there that might help you stand out with much lower time and monetary investments and get you in somewhere. Maybe part-time work to build up savings/contribute to household while you knock one of those out would be manageable?
I hear that from time to time but I’m never really sure what to do with that. I never see job postings that list a certification in the requirements or preferred qualifications outside of maybe some IT jobs, and they’re usually pretty hyper-specific. Have any suggestions on certs and where to take them?
I know for IT and helpdesk stuff CompTIA is the standard, and according one reddit thread IT/helpdesk can be a path forward for programmers who didn’t land an internship during undergrad
It’s time to start lying on your resume. I literally can’t code better than your average highschool graduate but I know enough about the industry and job to lie my ass off and I study a lot to pass these leetcode, system design, and behavioral interview questions. I work on some super complex financial systems I can’t understand at all but hey, I’m still employed for now until they decide to PIP me
DM me for advice if you’re open
Im university educated, have been unemployed for years in the past while looking for work in my field, and now work in the same job that I had when I was 16. its helpful to at least have a place to go, people to speak to, a routine and a space to organise in, its good for you.
revolutionary optimism doesnt always come easily, dont lose hope comrade.
You are entering the job market at a bad time, unfortunately. Many places are under hiring freezes still and have likely done recent layoffs that likely disproportionately impacted more jr workers.
The GPA doesnt matter once youve got a job or two under your belt but before that they dont have much to go on and particularly in this market they can be choosey. I would suggest doing open source projects and contribute to open source projects you use. This will keep you learning new things with the added benefit of producing materials you can talk about on your resume.
Personal projects and open source contribution are great ways to build a portfolio outside of employment.
Yeah, this was pretty much how I landed my first software development job. It was at a small mom-and-pop company, and I brought in my laptop to the interview to show off code samples from some game dev projects I had been working on.
Honestly, having been on a hiring committee, the most important thing you can do (if you land an interview) is to do your research about the company. Pretend you’re joining a cult, and you have to learn their Masonic sigils and secret handshakes from the outside.
My friend that graduated comp Sci gave up after about a year, he just moved to Cali to be a national park ranger and said he got cheap housing with it, it’s been tempting me won’t lie
How do you feel about joining the trades? I was unemployed for years for various reasons. I signed up for a class a few months ago and have been working now for two months. The situation where I live at least is that people are desperate for workers. If you use boomer methods (call nearby businesses and ask if they’ll train you) some might say yes.
what do you do? I thought usually you have to complete an apprentice program or something which is a couple years?
I took a free five-week class to become an apprentice oil burner technician but I later found out that I didn’t even have to. If you call local businesses they will tell you if they’re willing / able to train you or not. Some (particularly those with signs out front saying they are looking for workers) might be desperate enough to take you. Try to work for a bigger company so you have less of a chance of getting screwed. (Smaller businesses tend to be poorly and incompetently organized and run by bosses who will steal your wages.) The job is physical and dirty and it’s fucking oil but it’s far from the worst job I’ve had and I feel like there’s a lot of job security and potential for growth. It can also just be a gateway into the blue collar world.
I would assume equipment are only going to be moving more towards electricity systems now no?
Yeah definitely and I welcome that because this shit is not safe and it should have all been replaced decades ago. And I actually live in a state where we have a lot of heat pumps and more being installed every day. I just intend to keep doing this until I get fired or find something better. I’ve also written on hexbear about starting a worker co-op.
There’s always plumbing, too.
it’s not a silver bullet to your situation, but “gap” time can be reframed fairly easily as self-employment on resumes.
It can work but companies are wise to this. They’ll ask what projects you worked on and with what clients. You can say it’s all under NDA but that will only get you so far since you can still talk about the projects in very general terms like “used technology X, deployed webservices, wrote code in language Y”, etc.
I was in a similar situation: unemployed for 2 years after college, eventually just bit the bullet and got a min-wage job (thankfully not customer-facing). A year later I got a job actually in my field entirely through nepotism. I don’t know what to say, other than death to america, burn this blighted system to the ground.
From India, and in the same shitty situation as you. I’ve graduated at the end of September 2022. From the last six months, I’ve given up on applying anywhere. And I’ve whined more than you lol, I’m just so tired now.
it took me a year back in 2014 to get my first job out of college, basically as a QA/basic scripting person. I got completely lucky with it because a recruiter on one of those job sites like Indeed reached out to me with it. A big bonus you can add to your resume is to have open source projects you have contributed to on it, that you can talk about at length during the interview. That will make you stand out from the other applicants.
Regardless, yeah the job market for programmers has been pretty terrible this past year or two. It sucks. I would probably not go further in debt for a masters; maybe just do lots of open source work you can put on a resume. I personally did a lot of work on emulators like ppsspp and citra
This thread has mostly convinced me to lean more towards open source contributions than a masters, yeah. I don’t know what you did on citra, I’ve used it to emulate a few gens of Pokemon, so thanks for your work!
Its been a long time but i think i added
- Gateway cheats support
- Added support for gamepads (though i think my initial implementation was replaced at some point)
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this is not helpful at all
no it isn’t. but at true same time, where’s the lie
Death to America
you only think that cause you have savings from the job come on
not really. being unemployed is miserable and is designed to lead to depression and ultimately suicide. jobs - or at least all the jobs i’ve ever had - are also designed to lead to depression and suicide. different routes to the same destination
Death to America
That’s not a very materialist take. At any rate, as much as things suck and are scary and shitty and painful, I don’t plan on dying. I’ve been there before and I’m not going back. If you’re just being edgy and reductive, whatever. If you’re projecting and you’re in a bad place, I hope you get the help you need and I hope that things get better for you.
I had the same situation when I graduated. I ended up finding a technical sales-related job that sucked but led to a better position. Then I got laid off and couldn’t find another similar job for a long time until I got one through a recruiter and had to move states again. Some advice I have:
- Use recruiters. Not just for your situation, but in my experience going through recruiters is a much easier way to find and get jobs since they have relationships with these companies and know how to navigate the process. They can also basically coach you through the interviews so that you have a leg up on most people who would apply directly through the company. They also are better at negotiating pay and benefits and can help you there as well. I think all of the recruiters I’ve dealt with I found on LinkedIn (the paid job seeker thing puts you on their lists, or you can search directly and message them) and also I’d look for technical recruiting agencies and sign up on their websites.
- Be willing to move - Some job markets are better than others and being willing to move for a job gives you a lot more options. On the other hand, I’ve moved way too often and haven’t really been able to settle down anywhere and make any good real life friends, which sucks, but what are you gonna do. I have my pup to keep me company at least, and you all too of course.
- Embellish your resume - You don’t want to blatantly lie about your qualifications and put yourself in a risky position, but I’d definitely say you should exaggerate as much as you can get away with without arousing suspicion. ChatGPT is very helpful for this.
- Sort of related, also tailor your resume and cover letter to the job description of where you’re applying and using the same key words and phrases, since that will make it more likely you’ll get through the automated software screening and to an actual interview.
- Be flexible and look for opportunities that others might ignore. For example, maybe also look for programming jobs in areas like manufacturing, health care, small businesses, etc. and not just software companies. Sounds like you’re probably already doing this, though.
- I’m not a software dev but I’ve used hobby projects a bit in the past as a way to “demonstrate skills” when I had not much experience but wanted to pad my resume any way I could. Some hobby like 3D printing for example isn’t that big of a deal as far as a skill, but I was able to fluff it up quite a bit to my advantage. Seems like software would make hobby projects easier to get into, given you don’t need buy a bunch of stuff besides having a computer. Also sites like Coursera and edX have free classes that include projects that can be also be useful for this sort of thing.
Sorry for the wall of text here. I’m sure you’re already doing a lot of this already but I hope at least some of it is helpful.
